Trump v Harris: Gender gap defining a deadlocked race

Vice-President Kamala Harris is struggling to win support from men. Former president Donald Trump has the same problem with women.

A mural honoring women voters outside a Kamala Harris campaign rally in Erie, Pennsylvania. Picture: Getty Images via AFP.

Vice-President Kamala Harris is struggling to win support from men. Former president Donald Trump has the same problem with women.

The gender gap has come to define a deadlocked presidential race, with a galvanised group of women voting for Ms Harris because of her support for abortion rights and Mr Trump wooing men with uber-masculine rhetoric.

The split has affected the candidates’ media strategies and how they frame the issues most important to voters in the final weeks of the campaign.

While a divide between the sexes has become a fixture of modern elections, it appears to have broadened since 2020, cutting across many racial, educational and economic groups. Mr Trump’s five-point advantage among men in the 2020 election has widened to 10 points in The Wall Street Journal’s most recent national poll, in late August. President Joe Biden’s 12-point edge among women in 2020 has become a 13-point lead for Ms Harris.

Sarah Longwell, executive director of Republican Voters Against Trump, called 2024 the most gendered election she had seen, particularly among younger voters. “You don’t want it to become boys vs girls,” she said. “You don’t want to be in a political environment where your gender is the No.1 factor you are voting on.”

Mr Trump will tape a town hall before an all-female audience on Fox News this week, and Ms Harris on Monday rolled out an “opportunity agenda” for black men, including business loans, job training and health initiatives. She did a town hall on Tuesday with radio host Charlamagne tha God, who is popular with young black men. Ms Harris also has gone on podcasts and the Howard Stern show and will be interviewed by Fox News.

Polls show little evidence such overtures are working. In fact, with black and Latino men moving toward Mr Trump, the polls suggest that America is becoming a bit less divided politically by race and more divided by gender.

“I think men are very heavily economy-focused,” said David Lee, lead pollster for the pro-Trump MAGA Inc super political-action committee. “It all has to do with the economy and inflation.”

While women also care about the economy, abortion weighs equally heavy as an issue in their voting calculations. In a recent Wall Street Journal poll of the seven battleground states, 27 per cent of women – but 8 per cent of men – listed abortion as the top issue motivating their vote for president. The finding reflects the emphasis female voters have placed on abortion rights since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022.

One third of women said they couldn’t back a candidate who disagrees with them on abortion compared with 18 per cent of men who said so.

The second woman to be a major party’s nominee – and the first woman of colour – Mr Harris mostly avoids overt references to her gender or race, in contrast with her lone female predecessor Hillary Clinton, who donned suffragist white in big moments.

Still, Ms Harris’s embrace of music and dancing is popular with the women who attend her rallies, and she has leaned into a set of issues that connect with women, emphasising her support for the “care economy” and abortion rights.

Ms Harris has excoriated Mr Trump for appointing three of the justices that overturned Roe. “It’s clear that they just don’t trust women,” Ms Harris said of Mr Trump and Republicans during remarks on abortion rights last month in Atlanta. “Well, we trust women.”

Such priorities appeal to voters such as Bri Ortega, 27, of Glendale, Arizona, who said she was supporting Ms Harris in part because of abortion rights. She said she appreciated the family policies Ms Harris had laid out, because, “I really like people having open avenues to living their life how they want, either having a family or not having a family, and being able to plan out when they would like to have one.”

Ms Harris’s recent efforts to connect with men have included talking about owning a Glock and locking people up when she was district attorney of San Francisco, and she drank a beer on late-night television with Stephen Colbert.

“I think that Republicans are making her a caricature, and it’s important to have her out there, a real-life person, speaking to her experiences,” said Molly Murphy, a pollster for Ms Harris. “Showing that she is tough is a really important thing for all voters to see.”

Ms Harris’s efforts haven’t moved Bill Lloyd, 48, of Chandler, Arizona, a Republican. “The whole Colbert thing where Harris had the beer, that looked about as cringe as you could get,” said Mr Lloyd, who co-owns and runs operations for a landscaping company.

Mr Trump – who has long prized tough-guy talk – has projected a masculine persona, speaking about fighting enemies and suggesting that a “bloodbath” would ensue if he loses. During the Republican National Convention, he walked out one night to the James Brown song It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World and was praised on stage by celebrity wrestler Hulk Hogan.

Mr Lloyd said he appreciated Mr Trump’s tough rhetoric. “It doesn’t make me want to run out and buy a gun and fight for my life and all this weird extreme stuff,” he said. “But I do understand it, because I come from a long line of people that stand up for what they believe in. And if you don’t, then you’re just going to get run over by the mob.”

Mr Trump has a history of making derogatory comments about women, insulting former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Ms Clinton, along with media personalities such as Megyn Kelly and Mika Brzezinski. In 2023, a federal jury found him liable for sexually abusing and defaming advice columnist E. Jean Carroll in a Manhattan department store 30 years ago. He denied the charges.

Mr Trump’s selection of Ohio senator JD Vance as his running mate was also seen as a nod to young male supporters. Senator Vance has upset many women with comments about “childless cat ladies”.

Mr Trump campaign spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt said Mr Trump “is speaking directly to the concerns of women about the border, inflation, and foreign policy crises we face. If women want a president who is going to restore law and order and protect their families and bring down inflation, then President Trump is the only option on the ballot.”

Mr Trump recently told women that he would be their “protector”. Ms Ortega was unmoved. “I don’t feel as though I need a protector as a president, I just want someone to make decisions in the best interest of America,” she said.

Even as his support among female voters has lagged, Mr Trump has claimed that insulting Ms Harris would actually appeal to women. At a rally last week in Pennsylvania, Mr Trump said one of his aides told him: “Please don’t call her dumb. The women won’t like it.” But he disagreed.

“The women want to see our country come back,” Mr Trump said. “They don’t care. The women are tougher than the men, right?”

The Wall Street Journal